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Friday, December 18, 2009

Last Friday morning, I tried to get an early jump on my daily Entrecard and Adgitize droppings. While I was visiting Adgitize sites, new browser windows popped up, alerting me to a potential virus danger. I closed the pop-up and tried to continue my droppings. But I found that many of my browser links had been redirected. Either weird pages appeared, or the System Defender's Window Advanced Security Center! I could close that window, and search, but many of my other links didn't work. Randomly, little pop-up alert windows would pop-up automatically. If I clicked on them, the System Defender's Window Advanced Security Center would appear. A sample of the main screen is shown below.

So what is System Defender? Basically, the intention of this program's authors is to trick you into paying them to remove the badware they just placed on your system. It's a hi-tech blackmail scam. Things keep popping up, links are redirected, and your computer runs slowly.

I knew that this was a major problem and it needed to be removed. I did some searching and found a site called:

While it has as strange name, I knew that it is a reputable website that offers removal software products for free (because I had used it before on someone else's machine). Also, it has complete step-by-step instructions for how to use the Malwarebyte program below. So, I won't repeat that information again.

Once you arrive on bleepingcomputer.com, scroll down to the Automated Removal Instructions and download the Free Version from their site or from cnet:

Once you download it, close all your programs, including all browser windows. Then, double-click on the Malwarebyte Icon and perform a full scan of your computer. If you have System Defender or another bad virus or more, this program will find the evil ones. (If you don't close everything, the virus will still be alive in your open programs)

Depending on your computer, the full scan can take 2-3 hours (mine took almost 2 hours). When the scan is complete, it lists the malware found on you computer. Press the Remove Selected button, and it will do its work.

After a reboot, your computer should be working properly once again! (If not, repeat the scan. Sometimes you have to do that twice)

Prevention Advice

Even if your computer is not infected with anything and you think your Anti-Virus software will protect you, I recommend that you download the Malwarebyte Anti-Malware program ahead of time. This way, if for some unknown reason your computer is infected (like I was), you'll already have the removal program on your machine, and will know what to do.

Friday, December 11, 2009

As I woke up this morning, I had plans of completing all my blogging chores early. So, I dropped my regular Entrecards, then began going about my 100 Adgitize clicks. Then, I was going to write a long planned AskTheBlogster entry.

Just to mix things up, I decided to start the Adgitize clicking around 100 of the Leaderboard. As usual, things were going smoothly until I reached 90 clicks!

Then, browser windows & pop up screens took over my computer. I couldn't close anything, so I rebooted.

But the malware was still there! For the past 8 hours, I have been battling this vicious & unwanted enemy.

I finally got enough control of my machine to write this post, and will begin another important Viral Scan that will take hours.

I usually open 6 Agitize sites at a time & begin clicking on them. So, I don't know if the malicious site was one that was on the Leaderboard or one that has purchased a monthly ad.

(Perhaps even, the responsible site doesn't even know its infected).

This is really a pain in the rear, and makes one wonder if the $0.20 - $1.00 earned daily is really worth the effort.

Anyway, thanks to my recent commenters, but I won't get back to you until I clean this mess up.

Friday, December 4, 2009

As our website Lottery Power Picks has grown, we've realized that it has become difficult for visitors (and us), to find the quality articles and research pages that we worked on so hard. We realized that going forward, we will need to rewrite many of our pages to concentrate on individual lotteries. Ideally, we would pack as much information into a compact space as possible.

So with this, we thought that we need to organize and deliver topical links that could be easily updated and broadcast. We thought about writing little individual pages for this purpose.

But in the back of our mind, we wanted our information delivered as a feed. Perhaps like many, we were intimidated by the word "feed".

We did a quick search and found that an RSS feed can be easily created. Basically, you just need to create an xml file! The two best sites that describe how to do this are:

Afterwards, we added our feed to our iGoogle Home Page. Soon we will be adding more and more feeds for various lotteries and topics. Best of all, we now have an easy to use distribution and organization tool that our visitors can subscribe to.

Friday, November 27, 2009

As the Adgitize transition month is winding down, the Adgitize advertising network is holding up remarkably well. Last October 30th, there were 202 ads on the network. Nearly 1 month later, there are 176 ads (November 27th). This is only a 12.9% decline in purchased ads since the cost increased from $14 per month to $24/month.

While the cost of an ad increased by 71.4%, has the Adgitize member reimbursement increased as expected?

An advertiser who pays $24 per month (31 day advertising period) must earn $0.7742 per day to earn his money back. From Adgitize's initial projections, member earnings would increase from:

300 points a day

from 44 cents a day

to 72 cents a day

360 points a day

from 53 cents a day

to 86 cents a day

This implies that breakeven would be slightly over 300 points.

However, in a recent forum posting, Ken noted that a person who scored 305 points at the beginning of November earned $0.43, and at the end of November earned $0.52, a 20% increase!

BUT, if you earned 300 points, you'd expect to earn $0.72 which is $0.20 more than actually being paid back. That represents a 27.78% underestimate.

Translating this to a monthly payback, I expect those who paid $24 for a monthly ad and earned 300 points to take a $6.00 LOSS and receive only $18 back.

I know that cornyman, Ken, and others have all agreed with me in saying last month that advertisers would not receive full earning potential during this transitional month of November.

But I'm not sure that folks who pay the full $24 next month will receive their money back either!

Why? Because if you have the opportunity to click on many of the Adgitize ads now in the system, you will see that many of these are brand new. Some have very little content, and don't even display Adgitize ads.

What this means is that old advertisers pulled out. And, five dollars of the new money from the new advertisers is going out of the system to pay affiliate commissions to the member who recruited them. This means that instead of $24 being contributed into the system, only $19 is actually going back.

So, my conclusion is that most advertisers will not earn their full $24 back again next month. Instead, they will only earn somewhere between $19-$22 in December.

As a result, I will sit on the sidelines again next month, click on 101 ads, and read the member comments, complaints, worries, and praises.

I am confident that as we shake through this rough process, earnings will stabilize once again, perhaps in January 2010.

Unfortunately, at this time, I do not think that Adgitize or other members thought they'd all be losing money this month. Now is the time to think about next month, and question whether Advertisers will receive their full $24 ad costs back month. I don't think so.

And how much can you earn as a Publisher Only? Approximately $0.20 per day, $6.00 per month, or $72.00 per year!

Now if you don't think that's a lot of money, consider this: Advertisers on the system pay $24 per month. In return, they will receive somewhere between $26 to $32 (according the the Adgitize estimated payout), making a monthly profit of $2-$8.

You, however, paid nothing, and still get back $6 each month. That's in infinite return.

And if you're already an Adgitize member paying the monthly $24 fee, take a look at your profit and compare the difference between the Advertisers and Publishers income. You might be able to spend the $24 somewhere else and still receive your same profit!

Friday, November 13, 2009

The purpose of the site is to bring focus to a variety of Blogs by presenting monthly awards and highlighting their accomplishments. Members must join and place widgets on their site. Once done, a member can then nominate and vote for outstanding Blogs of various classes.

BlogNetAwards is very well laid out and has terrific graphics. Over the period that it operated, it featured countless Blogs that many of us visit daily.

However during the past few months, I noticed that the site hasn't been updated and I was considering removing its widgets. I wondered if the site was abandoned and simply aging away. So, I sent them mail and asked about the status.

Within minutes, I received a reply from the Administrative Director, Diane Bjorling indicating that the BlogNet Portal and dreams have temporarily been placed on hold.

The site's owner, Tim Southernwood, a parent of 4 young children, has unexpectedly been thrust into legal divorce battle. As a result, Tim needs to place his entire focus on protecting the children and getting through this difficult period.

Since I believe that BlogNetAward has been an important vehicle in our community, I would like to ask all of you to share your support of Tim and his children.

While I recognize that many in our blogging community don't share the same American Holidays or customs, the Thanksgiving / Christmas Season can be extremely stressful to a family experiencing such hardship.

You can provide your support by:

Leaving a comment to this post, or

Sending and Entrecard Message directly to BlogNetAwards

(I hesitate giving his email address in this post for fear of spammers).

This past year has been extremely difficult for many in our small EC / Adgitize / BlogNet community who have experienced financial hardships, severe natural disasters, and the passing of loved ones. So as this Holiday Season approaches, I stop to give thanks for blessing me and my family with health and happiness.

But more importantly, I stop to say a prayer for all those in need.

Perhaps through our support, Tim and his children will find the strength to see themselves along their difficult road, realize they're not alone, and will return to our community soon!

Friday, November 6, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to place a new AdBrite ad on this blog. Since I am familiar with Adbrite, I am careful not to display their "Full Page Ads" on any of my pages because they:

Are Annoying,

Turn visitors away from your site,

Tarnish your reputation.

Are Against the Entrecard, Adgitize, CMFads Terms of Service, and

Are Poor Revenue Generators.

To me, there's nothing worse than being brought to some undesirable page when you click on a members widget and having to press the "Skip this ad" button to get to the site you wanted.

So, you can imagine my horrified surprise when I was writing last week's post to discover that this site was indeed displaying the AdBrite Full Page Ads!

At first, I thought the blog was hacked, but then I realized:

Ah ha! It's the AdBrite Trickery Gotcha!

So frantically, I went to my AdBrite account and saw that the Display Full Page Ads box was checked to ON, even though I had set it to OFF. I then went through each of my ads and made sure this option was off on all of them.

What surprised me was that no one had notified me that these ads were displaying. When I thought back to all the other sites that have displayed these as well, I realized that many (if not all) of those authors were probably unaware that AdBrite secretly set their Display Full Page options to ON as well.

So if you display AdBrite ads on your Blog or Site, you may want to spend a few moments to review your AdBrite settings for every Ad you display. Perhaps you too will find that you are unintentionally displaying these ads and turning away welcomed visitors. To Check your settings:

Log into your AdBrite account

Click the For Publishers Tab

Select the Manage ad zones link

Then for each Site / Name ad,

Press the More Arrow

Select Ad Zone Preferences

Make Sure the "Show full page ads?" box is UNCHECKED

Press Save Changes

Hope this helps you too from continuing to be an unwilling victim of these undesirable pollutants!

Friday, October 30, 2009

As we leap from blog to blog, we often marvel at the diverse amount of information displayed on various blogs, and are especially curious as to how various things were added.

In particular, we noticed that: several blogs contained a "Recent Comments" section on their side bars; and, that section enabled visitors to quickly see what others were saying. Visitors would easily respond for all to see, and thus, an interactive environment was formed.

that announced that Comments, and other items, could be easily placed on your Blogger Blog.

Since we added the "Recent Comments" gadget to this Blog, we have enjoyed an increased amount of commenting activity (as you can see on the right hand sidebar). Almost instantly, our Blog became interactive!

Besides Comments, you can add: Twitter updates, Picasa Photostream thumbnails, and Recent Posts. After Clicking on the Link above, simply:

Click on the "Add it now" link,

Indicate your blog from the pulldown menu, and

Press the "Configure Gadget" arrow, which will allow you to specify how many comments to display, the overall height, and more.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Just a quick post to remind everyone that the price of a 31 day monthly Adgitize ad will increase from $14 to $24 beginning Sunday, November 1st 2009.

However, its not too late to purchase a new ad at the current low price.

If you're not presently an Adgitize member, but have considered it, we encourage you to act Now and join before the price increases! Joining is easy, simply click on below, enroll, and submit your site.

At the same time, you should purchase an Ad, and receive the benefits of:

Being a Preferred Publisher,

Getting Additional Traffic, and

Earning Money!

After buying your first ad now at $14, you find that you will earn enough in a month to cover your advertising cost!

But Remember

Time's running out,

You gotta Act Now!

And, for those who are already Adgitize advertisers, you should seriously consider purchasing a second (or third) ad this month before your current ad expires. You can take advantage of this "Last Minute" saving by designing a new 125x125 gif, and submitting it.

We suggest that all ads be submitted by Thursday October 29th at the latest in order to give the Adgitize folks time to review and approve your purchase.

As Ken, Aldon, and others have stated in their comments, Adgitize is an wonderful tool for dedicated bloggers. Why, because you will be in excellent company. Everyone there has the same goals: to Blog, Attract Readership, and Earn Advertising Revenue.

If however, you are like us and want to "Wait and See" what the Pricing Structure does to Earnings, then make sure you work on replacing the Adgitizing visitors by participating in:

Entrecard (who just recently made a Great move by awarding members 50% of the EC's paid by advertisers on you site),

Friday, October 9, 2009

In the Website/Blog management process, it seems that every time you think things are rosy and your environment is stable, an unpredictable obstacle blocks your way. Instead of being able to devote your time to enhancing your site and its content, you must stop, regroup, determine a course of action, and often start over. It always seems that we're taking:

One Step Forward, and

Two Steps Backward.

In a rather stunning blog post yesterday morning, Adgitize announced that it would be increasing monthly advertising rates from $14 to $24 a month beginning November 1st 2009.

This is a 71.43% increase in rates and is rather substantial for a service that is only 1 year old. Adgitize understands the magnitude of this increase and expects a number of publishers to be irate, complain, or leave. However, since they anticipate membership and ad publishing to quadruple next year, they need more money to handle this increased demand.

Like everyone else, we have embraced Adgitize as a low-cost Entrecard and advertizing solution to increasing readership. While we cannot critize Adgitize's action, it is necessary for us to re-evaluate the pros and cons of: staying or leaving this great company; and, paying the increased advertising prices.

On Leaving or Staying

The Pros: The only satisfaction of leaving is that we have made a statement. Other than that, nothing is gained.

The Cons: Should we leave, we would lose potential income and readership. During the past year, we have made many friends. Several have commented on our posts implying that folks are indeed reading our content and finding it interesting. In leaving, we would let these people down.

Conclusion: Leaving Adgitize accomplishes nothing. In the end, we would only be hurting ourselves. Thus, we will stay.

On Advertising
Our advertising situation is slightly different than most. For the past 2 months, we have been purchasing two ad spots which cost us $28 per month. Since rates haven't increased this month of October, we have renewed both which will expire in November. But, next month we need to decide whether to buy 2, 1, or no ads.

Our Adgitize Habits
We try to publish a new post every day and visit the maximum number of sites. Since points are awarded for Writing Articles and Clicking, we can pretty much count on receiving 200 points per day. This is appears to be the minimum number of points needed for earning $0.15 per day, and $0.24 after rates are increased.

Because we are advertisers, we receive 160 extra points for advertising (because we have 2 ad spots) and are on the Preferred Publishers List.

Additionally, we have earned additional points for both Ad and Page views which we attribute to advertising. The sum of these points contributes another 100-120 points per day.

In total, our daily points are around 460-470, which means that we earn approximately $0.63 daily. Translating this to the new payment schedule, we would receive $1.03 each day.

Should We Continue to Buy 2 Ads?
Purchasing 2 ads has only increased our total site visits by a little and our income has underperformed that of a single ad. Last month, we were about 8th on the Leaderboard but our income was slightly less than $20. We have not recruited any advertising members, so we don't receive any other affiliate income. Since ads run for 31 days, we are paying $0.9032 per day and receiving only $0.63/day. This is a daily loss of $0.2732 or $8.47 per month. When the new payment schedule becomes effective, two ads would cost $47/month which equals $1.5161 per day. For this, we would receive $1.03 per day, meaning we lose $0.4861/day or $15.07 monthly.

Our conclusion is that the loss of $15 monthly ($180/year) is not worth the benefit we receive in additional page view traffic or ad views.

Therefore, we will not purchase 2 ads in the future.

Should We Buy One Ad?
If we buy only 1 ad at the higher rates, our daily expense will be $0.7742. We will lose 50 points for the 2nd ad and a few page views. This will bring our total points to 370-400/day but we will still be a Preferred Publisher. In return, we will receive $0.86 per day, meaning that we will earn a profit of $0.0858 or $2.66 for the month.

But Will Everyone Continue to Advertise at the New Rate?
All of our calculations are based on the assumption that the number of advertisers remain the same as today. But since rates are increasing by over 71%, we believe that many Advertisers will drop out. Several factors reinforce this assumption:

Many Advertisers are located in the Asia/Pacific region,

Much of the world economies are suffering,

Money is tight,

Unemployment is high,

Taxes are being raised across the board, and

The Holidays are coming.

Because of these, we believe that probably 50% will not renew their ads at the higher rates in November. Last night, there were 203 advertisers. If half drop out, the estimated payouts that Adgitize states will then be cut to existing levels or lower. This means that those who are earning payouts of $14/month now will continue to be making only $14 in the future. That would translate into a $10/month loss. If this happens, more people will drop out and revenue will decline further.

So What Will We Do?
Based on the uncertainty of breaking even, we have concluded that our best option is to:

Buy NO Ads.

In doing this, we will drop down into the 2nd lowest tier of payouts. If we continue to Click and Write Articles, we will receive 200 points, which currently qualifies for payouts of $0.15/day or $4.65 per month. If advertising levels remain the same, then we could expect to receive $0.24/day or $7.44/month. Either way, Not Advertising is a NO RISK solution to earning a small bit of money.

How Will We Replace the Lost Traffic?In one word: Entrecard! Although we have critized Entrecard for forcing members to display paid ads, their advertising network remains free of charge. By ramping up our EC Advertising campaigns and clicking on member banners, we will replace the 50-100 visits that we lose from Adgitize. This means that we, as Adgitize members, will continue to be awarded points for both Ad and Page views. With this replacement traffic, our Adgitize points may increase by another hundred, bringing our total points to 300/day and qualifying us for much higher payouts.

So What Should Have Adgitize Done?To raise income flows, we believe that Adgitize should have CUT the monthly advertising fee from $14 to $10 per month. In doing this, members would be earning less, but Adgitize would be earning more. Why? Because we believe more people would find this attractive. New members would embrace the lower cost basis, and immediately begin to advertise. Existing members would also consider purchasing 2nd ads for their sites. So, all around, we believe this would have been the best alternative. (But, this is only our opinion).

Conclusion
To summarize, our course of action beginning November 2009 will be that of a "Wait and See". We will:

Stay with Adgitize,

Remain Calm and NOT become Mad,

Stop all Advertising on Adgitize,

Ramp Up Our Entrecard Campaigns,

Hope that All of You Continue to Follow Us,

Wait and See what Other Advertisers Do, and

Reconsider Our Decision in January or February 2010.

If you also worry about what to do regarding Adgitize advertising, or if you have a supporting or disagreeing opinion, feel free to write a comment and let us and Adgtize know. If you write a Post on your own, let us know what it is. And remember, we're all in this together and want Adgitize to succeed. As I said in the beginning, it's:

Monday, September 28, 2009

The underlying concept of Entrecard was genius: To provide a vehicle where bloggers thoughout the world could interact and advertise Free of charge! To accomplish this, a fictitious economy was created, rewarding members for visiting other sites and advertising. In this, Entrecard's success was unparalleled. At its peak, some estimate that over 30 thousand members participated.

To be truly successful, however, it is important to capitalize on one's efforts.

Unfortunately, it appears that Entrecard failed to create a viable Business Plan which would address the methodology of earning income while providing its founding services.

As if in a panic, Entrecard resorted to selling membership ad space and delivering it to the captive membership. This resulted in alienaiting members and losing its base.

Under new Entrecard ownership, the paid ads were eliminated, and membership began to grow again. But, not having a Business Plan, Entrecard is reinstituting their Paid Ad delivery system. It was initially planned to be implemented beginning September 28th 2009, but, this date is now pushed back to the week of October 5th.

The new system will occupy 15% of the network inventory. If, however, a member wishes to opt out, he can pay $50 per year to be ad free.

Reading the comments in their blog, members have mixed opinions about this whole thing. And we did too.

So, we decided to analyze what this means:

Entrecard allows members to receive credits for dropping on 300 sites maximum.

Assuming that a member meets this maximum 300 days of the year, there will be 90,000 ad impressions that one visits.

Multiplying 90K times 15%, the user will be exposed to 13,500 ad impressions.

Since one can opt out for of the 13,500 impressions for $50, we calculate that Entrecard expects ad impressions to cost $3.7037 per 1000 impressions.

We think this is a lot of money!

Another way of looking at this is by membership:

If 1,000 members agree to pay $50, Entrecard receives $50,000

If 10,000 members agree to pay $50, Entrecard receives $500,000

Wow, Entrecard can get a lot of money from a captive audience!

So what do we think? Entrecard will continue to be the sought after delivery vehicle for New Bloggers who are trying to build an audience and learn the ropes.

However, seasoned members will go elsewhere for their primary audience. Why?

As time goes by, followers are developed.

Bloggers begin to willingly purchase Paid Ads on other networks.

As they grow, they will devote more time to their content, and less to dropping.

Most blogs derive income from displaying ads.

Since a blog's ad space is valuable, why would one display Entrecard for free?

And, if one already purchases their own ads, why would they want to display Entrecard's for free?

Based on this simple economic evaluation, we believe that Entrecard does not have a Business Plan of their own. At present, they are simply attempting to piggy-back on others. This type of strategy will not succeed since it is simply parasitic.

While we will not be dropping Entrecard from our arsonal, we will be demoting their widgets to less important portions of our blogs. Many others may just drop them flat out. This means that the expected revenue that Entrecard is hoping to get will not be there, because advertisers will not want to pay top dollar for poor quality ad space!

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Today we decided to review our Blogger Basic settings and discovered a new Global Settings option:

An Updated Editor

Blogger's latest features help link describes all of the important features that were implemented and released in celebration of Blogger's 10th year birthday!

If you are a Blogger user, you can enable the new editor by going to your blogs Settings | Basic tab. Just about near the bottom you will see the "Select post editor" label with the "Updated editor" option. Simply click on this new option, and save your settings! Then you're done.

Many of the enhancements and improvements include:

Improved Image Handling

Improved Raw HTML editing

Geotagging your posts

Vertical resizing

Easier link editing

Safari 3 support

A new Preview dialog

Placeholder image for tags

New Toolbar

From just this short time using this new editor, we have found it to be immensely more friendly and easier to use. We suggest all of you give it a try!

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

When we visited our site LotteryPowerPicks.com on Sunday, we were surprised to see an anti-virus warning in one our our 125x125 widgets. It was in place of sitehoppin.com.

Having been a victim of malicious hackers in the past, we take these warnings seriously, because we want to protect both: our site; and, the computers of our visitors. Therefore, we immediately removed the link from our site.

SiteHoppin.com is (and has been) a popular site with bloggers & website owners because of its potential for referring visitors. Thus, we were surprised to see that the safety this site was compromised.

Using a different computer today, we performed a Google search for "sitehoppin". As expected, it is the first listing returned. Immediately under the title, is a warning, saying that this site may be harmful to your computer. Clicking on the site's URL will bring you to a Google "Warning" page, again stating that this site may harm you computer.

If you or your site is a sitehoppin.com member, we recommend that you:

DO NOT click on any of the sitehoppin.com logos displayed

DO NOT go sitehoppin

REMOVE all links to sitehoppin.com that you may have placed on your site

REMOVE the sitehoppin toolbar if you have installed it

DO NOT download (or save) any of the images from that site

RESIST the temptation to add your site or blog to sitehoppin.com

We recommend that you follow this advice until the site's safety is restored. When it is, we will write a follow-up to this post.

JL......

Footnotes:

We are writing this post as a precaution to the PC security of our fellow bloggers. It is not our intention to degrade this site, but to simply alert visitors of potential problems.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

In short, the new EC management believes that the number of Entrecard Credits has been growing too rapidly. This growth, which they call Inflation, will lead to EC's being worth less and less.

To combat this Inflation, Entrecard is instituting a new policy beginning September 1st 2009:

Only EC Droppers will receive 1 credit.

Previously, both the dropper and the Blog receiving the visit received a credit.

Many of those who replied to their blog post were supportive of this move, but we believe this action underscores the EC position: All for Me, and None for You!

Why do we think this way? Consider these facts:

Previously, EC members received credit for daily blog posts. This has been eliminated.

While advertising costs has remained the same, EC takes 3/4 of the price of the ads and puts them in their own coffers. For example: if you pay 256 to advertise your blog, only 64 credits are given to the displaying site, the other 192 are kept by EC.

So now, EC is awarding less and less credits to the Customer Members, and building up their own war chest for future sale.

When this new policy is implemented, we believe there will be less incentive for Blog owners to purchase ads since they won't get anything back for advertising!

While EC is still a good place for beginner Bloggers, we believe that these new reductions will pursuade seasoned members into becoming less and less active. Eventually, the decline in EC activity and membership (because of their inherent greed) will have more of a deflating effect on the remaining EC credits than worrying about the inflated growth of a ficticious economy.

Monday, August 17, 2009

This morning, we wanted to return some of the Entrecard Drops that we received since yesterday. So, we visited our Drops Inbox page, and displayed "Cards you haven't dropped on". We began clicking on member cards.

All of a sudden, we saw an endless number of Tabs being opened, and our computer slowed right down. Luckily, the browser crashed. When we restarted the browser again, our anti-virus notified us that several "Malicious Trojans" were removed.

Has this happened to you?

We haven't determined which EC member card caused this, but have decided to pull back from returning drops until we have time to try and isolate the Bad Guys.

If you have had similar experiences lately, let us know. If so, perhaps we can all work together to restore a safe blogging environment.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Yesterday we read that Adgitize has increased the total number of points a member could earn by 100, bringing the maximum daily credits to 600 points.

This is done by awarding points to those purchasing multiple ads.

In the past, an advertiser could only earn 100 points for the 1st ad placed on the network.

Now, an advertiser will earn 50 more points for the 2nd ad, and 25 points for the 3rd and 4th ads. In addition, the 3rd and 4th ads placements ad discounted to $13 and $12 respectively. (The price of the second ad remains at $14).

We're not sure if this new structure will result in publishers earning more daily income, but we decided to give it a try, and placed our 2nd ad on the system for this blog,AskTheBlogster.

Our Adgitize goal has been to receive enough monthly income to cover our advertising costs. With only one ad on the system, we have continually reached our goal. But now, our costs are $24 per month. So, we will have to wait until next month to determine whether the second ad will pay for itself or not.

We'll let you know.

Anyway, the folks at Adgitize are working hard by trying to help us all achieve our earning potentials.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Last Tuesday, I wrote and published an AskTheBlogster blog entry titled: "Entrecard Credit Value Established at $3.37 Minimum".

However, when I checked my Adgitize statistics the following day, I noticed that I never received credit for the post.

Reviewing my published blog, I saw that it was dated Monday August 3rd, not Tuesday August 4th.

Next I looked at my published Feedburner entry, and it was dated August 4th as I expected.

So what happened? How could the dates be different?

The answer has to do with Blogger. I first began writing notes for this post entry on Monday the 3rd. Then on Tuesday, I wrote the post using the notes that I had previously written. When I was satisfied with the content, I published the post.

What I didn't realize at the time was that Blogger dates a blog entry with the day and time that the post was originally created, not when it was published. Thus, when we read the blog, we see the Monday's date.

Feedburner, however, records the time the entry was actually published. This is what we expect.

So, the lesson learned is that:

Whenever writing a Blogger Post, make sure the entry was created on the date you wish it to be timestamped. Otherwise, your posts may not receive credit from Adgitize or Entrecard (or perhaps others).

PS: I brought this matter up to Adgitize and was credited with the post. Thanks Ken!

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

As the new Entrecard team begins to take shape, a number of changes are beginning to be announced.

First, a new Director of Business Development was appointed. Her name is Cindy and she will be communicating with the Entrecard user base via the Entrecard Blog which is accessible as a menu choice along the top of the EC pages.

Second, in her first post on Wednesday July 22nd 2009, Cindy informed the community that the "Paid Ad" program will be discontinued. This is great news to EC members because it means that everyone's Free Ads should now be showing on the EC widgets. She didn't say what the time frame of the phase out would be, and as of yesterday, paid ads were still displaying. Hopefully this change will become effective soon.

Third, the "credit cashout program" is being eliminated. EC will try to fulfill the outstanding redemption requests with the available funds remaining, but makes no promises on fulfilling those requests.

So, what does all this mean to members of the Entrecard community?

Primarily, it tells us that EC is going back to the original business model of providing a free advertising vehicle for bloggers, and nothing more.

Unfortunately, the blogging landscape has changed. Companies like Adgitize and CMF Ads provide cash incentives for active members. This means that EC is now left behind.

Further, EC places an expensive "Rake" on members wishing to advertise. When an advertiser agrees to purchase an ad, 1/2 of the EC credits go directly into the pockets of the EC Corporation. Additional "taxes" are placed on purchases in the Marketplace and in EC transfers.

Even though EC credits are now declared worthless, there is an underlying value that is not communicated to the membership. Why in the world would EC wish to rake off commissions unless the credits had some definitive financial value? How many credits are we talking about?

Well, assume that EC has only 5,000 active members who purchase a single 32 credit ad daily. Of this EC gets 16 credits per ad, and the publisher gets 16 credits.

If you do the multiplication, you will see that (5000 ads * 16 credits * 365 days ) = 29,200,200 is deposited in the banks of the Entrecard economy per year. And, this is only a drop in the bucket since EC membership had peaked at 30,000 members and many ads are valued at 64, 128, 256, 512 and more credits.

So while the new Entrecard managerial policies are formulated, we recommend that you hold onto and amass your EC credits, rather than spend them frivously. If the new company goes public, we think that credits belonging to Entrecard members will be awarded actual cash value on par with those in the vast holding of the Entrecard banks.

If however, the new EC Team insists that the credits are worthless, then all advertising rakes and taxes should be abolished, as there would be no incentive for EC to accumulate them.

Monday, July 27, 2009

If you have a website or blog with hosting capabilities, you should consider making yourself a favicon! What is a favicon? It's the little image that appears next to your browser url and on the various tabs. A favicon is a 16x16 bit image which can may be a .png, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .bmp or .ico format.

Friday, July 17, 2009

We received mail this morning from Entrecard founder Graham Langdon, announcing the sale of Entrecard to ZipRunner.

We would like to congratulate Graham & the rest of the Entrecard team on creating a fantastically free product which helped thousands in the blogging community to grow.

While many could criticize Graham for running the ship with an iron hand, he certainly provided a friendly environment for us to increase our traffic and make lasting relationships globally.

In the recent months, EC made many changes which affected the company immensely:

They raised $140,000 in Angel Money

They began selling paid ads

They placed a cash-out value of $1 per 1,000 credits.

Many members complained about the paid ads because: their own free ads were not being shown; the paid ads were unattractive; and cash out requests were not paid. As a result, many left outright and others simply became less active.

Monday, July 13, 2009

We received a comment on our Lottery Power Picks New/Blog from a member named Cornyman, telling us that we had a comment on our Adgitize blog post. After performing a search forAdgitizein that same blog, we found another Cornyman comment telling us that we had too many ads on our blogs.

We next checked the Adgitize Faq page, and sure enough, it states:

Can I show more than one ad on my blog at a time?A - Yes, we have a wide range of ad sizes 125 X 125 and 468 X 60 that you can place on your blog. These ad sizes can have groupings of between 1 and 4 ads of their specific size. You are limited to only 2 groupings on your blog. These 2 groupings can contain only 10 Adgitize Advertiser ads total.

So we quickly examined our blogs and remove the 3rd occurrences.

Thanks for pointing this out Cornyman! And remember, if you're looking for an effective way to increase your traffic, join Adgitze by clicking on the banner below!

So, if you're looking for a Free, Easy and Fun way to drive traffic to your site, we suggest that you add Along for the Ride by clicking on the link above. After a while, you just might be as thrilled as we are!

Friday, May 15, 2009

We recently posted a Security Alert warning our visitors of the potentially harmful site. Shortly thereafter, the site owner left a comment stating that his site was indeed hacked. After discovering this malicious attack, he worked diligently with his site hosting company to cleanse his site.

Within days, Serradinho.com rectified this situation and Google lifted its warning.

We applaud the hard work and dedication of this site owner and rescind our warning as well.

Based on his speedy resolution to this potentially dangerous situation, we are confident that this reputable owner will continue to insure that his site remains safe in the future. So, we now recommend that you:

Friday, May 1, 2009

While performing our daily Adgitize visits, we read one blogger's post promoting Free Pixels available on Serradinho.com. Always trying to get free advertising, we visited the site and saw the logo gifs of many familiar EC members. So, we submitted the logo of one of our sites.

After registering, the site sends you mail with a link to activate your pixels.

Using a different computer, we read our mail and clicked on the activate link.

Upon doing this, a Google warning page was automatically displayed, warning us NOT to proceed any further because the site is suspected of containing malicious spy ware. After clicking the link 3 times, we were convinced this was no accident.

Accordingly, we are advising all our readers to:

Resist the temptation to add your site or blog to serradinho.com

And, if you get there:

DO NOT click on any of the logos displayed

DO NOT download (or save) any of the images from that site

We are not sure if this site was written with the intention to propagate mal-ware, or if it simply has security holes enabling hackers to infest its site.

In any case: Avoid this site as your computer may become infected.

JL......

Footnotes:

We are writing this post as a precaution to the PC security of our fellow bloggers. It is not our intention to degrade this site, but to simply alert visitors of our experiences.

We believe our logo has been added even though we never completed the activation.

Additionally, Adgitize revised their point structure as of April 1, 2009. Meaning that those who are actively involved, earn more points and more money.

How Much Money Can You Earn?Right now, that's a bit up in the air, but our guestimate is approximately $24-30 per month if you post daily, click the maximum number of sites allowed, and are a paid advertiser.

How Much Time Do You Need to Spend Each Day?We believe that you will need to spend around 1 hour each day to earn the maximum from Adgitize. Writing a new post will take around 30 minutes, and clicking on the other member ads will be about 30 minutes as well.

How Do You Join?Either click on the Adgitize link above, or the banner below. Once there, look for and click the "Register" on the left side of the page. Then fill out the form, and you're in!

How Do You Click on Sites?Once you have joined, you should place the Adgitize advertising widget on your site. This will earn you points.

Next, you will want to click on all the member sites. In order to do this, you must visit Adgitize and log-in, otherwise you clicks won't be counted.

Then, rather than hunting around for sites to click on, we recommend you do one of the three:

Go to their "LeaderBoard" page and click on each of the sites listed. They will have ads for you to click.

Go to their "Reports" page, and then click on the "Publisher's Blogs Not Clicked Today". This will give you another list of sites.

And, lastly, you can add your site to the Mr. Linky list below. Bookmark this page, and visit the sites listed there.

Friday, April 17, 2009

In order to be successful after you launch your website or blog, you need to get visitors. But how to do this is often a mystery to the novice on an extremely minimal budget.

You may believe that you are doing everything that is right, such as posting interesting articles, updating content frequently, telling friends, and concentrating on keywords. But, still you're only getting 1-5 visitors a day. How can you improve this?

How do you get more visitors?

By joining the "Clickable Networks".

These are the organizations who enroll members, require you to display a widget of sorts, and encourage you to visit other member sites by clicking on their widget.

From our experience, we have identified 5 Clickable Network providers and have listed them below in alphabetical order:

Of the 5, two insist that you must be a blog. The other three allow both websites and blogs to join.

In our upcoming posts, we will present an in-depth review of each of these networks. We will discuss both the advantages and drawbacks of each. In addition, we will inform you as to whether your membership will be rewarding or a waste of time.

Until then,

JL..........

PS: The above list is comprised of the networks we joined. If you know of others, please leave a comment and describe them.

Monday, April 13, 2009

During the past few months, Yahoo has introduced significant improvements to their Yahoo! Search Marketing product.

Primarily, they added 3 important features:

Demographic Bidding

Geo-targeting, and

Ad Scheduling

First, Demographic Bidding allows you to target your ads to different groups of people, and adjust your bids accordingly. You may set different advertising rates for varying age groups or sex.

Second, you can specify different regions of the U.S. or Canada to target using the Geo-targeting feature. Using this refinement, you can limit your ads to display in entire countries, or in specific Zip or Postal Codes only.

And third, Ad Scheduling allows you to display your ads at differing times of the day, rather than the old 24 hours per day.

In addition to these modifications, they are now filtering out many of the "parked sites" that click on your ads without ever producing any revenue.

If your blog or website offers particular products to sell, these new features can assist you in reaching the buying audience that you are looking for. Remember:

Friday, April 10, 2009

We recently joined CMF Forums and read of one member's frustration with Google Analytics not working properly. They included an Analytics screen shot that says they only had 1 Visit with 0.0 time on the site and 100% bounce rate.

We visited their site for a couple of days so we know that there are more than 1 visitor. So, we decided to investigate a little deeper.

We went to their site again, and used our browser's option to look at their page's html source. We found their tracking code and believe that there may be 4 problems with it:

First, the tracking code may be in the incorrect location. Google recommends that it be located at the very end of the HTML and just before the < /body > tag. Their's is in the middle of the page.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, the code is missing the "try {} check {}" error block. That's not good.

Third, you may have another script that prevents this from working. If so, place the tracking code at the top of your source code, just before the < /head > tag.

Fourth, look at your account number. We don't know what it should be, but if you have multiple sites, you may be using the wrong one.

To correct the above, we recommend you remove the existing code, get new tracking code, and use the Google Utilities to check that it is working.

How do you go about doing the above?

Follow these Steps:

Log into your Google Account

Go to your "My Account" Page

Under the My Products Heading, Look for and click the Analytics Link

Click on the Edit links under Action. This will show your Profile settings. It will display your site name & profile ID, then a table of your website info.

Look to the top right of the 1st table and it will display the green check mark & Receiving Data label. If it doesn't, something is wrong.

Also in this area of the page is a (Check Status) link. You should press this!

And then see what the status is. (It should say Receiving Data, if not, something's still wrong)

Most Importantly, it will give you the Tracking Code you need to place on your site.

Copy the code and paste it in your site's HTML Code. (don't forget to remove the old stuff)

Save your new sites HTML page, and then repeat Step 6

Once added correctly, it will take around 24 hours before data flows correctly.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

If you're a Google AdSense publisher, there are two important notices that you should address.

Update your Privacy Policy (by April 8th)

Remove Video Units (by April 30th)

First is their request for you to review and update your Privacy Policy in preparation for interest-based advertising. They provide you a link which describes what information you should include about Google and the DoubleClick DART cookie. Your work should be completed by April 8, 2009. You can read their official notice your account's main AdSense Reports page.

The second notice indicates that the AdSense Video Units product will be retired at the end of April 2009. This means that if you have installed video units on you website or blog, you should consider removing that content by the end of the month. Apparently, this product has not performed as expected.

Monday, April 6, 2009

Long before the recent economic downturn hit, many people were lured into starting blogs and websites by people promising to either make you rich or learn the secrets of earning large yearly incomes. All we had to do was to buy a book or video, get a domain name, place some ads, join an affiliate marketing program, hire an SEO, and watch the revenues pour in.

To those of us with similar dreams, we learned the sad and harsh reality that this will probably never occur.

Creating a successful site requires a lot of time, hard work, trials & errors, internet searching, self doubt and wondering.

In our upcoming posts, we will share our experiences. We will let you know what worked for us, and what things were a waste of time. We will provide you a road map for establishing your online presence, inform you of important news, and tell you things you should be doing.

Our future posts will address topics such as :

Boosting you Visitors Count

Free Blogging Networks

Paid Advertising

Social Marketing

Free Advertising Vehicles

Affiliate Marketing

Website Security

Noteworthy Programming Tools

Knowing Your Visitors

Important News

How-to's

and more.

We plan to update our blog 3 times a week, usually on Monday, Tuesday and Friday.